Victimhood Is a State of Mind—You Can Change It

Rep. Dan Crenshaw
Getty Images, found here

My US Representative, Dan Crenshaw, wrote an op-ed over the weekend, on The Daily Wire, called, “Victimhood Ideology Is Getting Worse. Here’s What We Can Do to Fix It.” I thought that would be worth the read. It was. 

I read his book, Fortitude, last summer. So the concepts aren’t new. But applied here to the current woke culture I think is valuable.

He refers to the clash between “victimhood” and “victorhood” as possibly the most profound of our time. Victorhood is not a word in the dictionary, but it’s understandable enough; it’s about being a winner. You can’t be a winner—come out victorious—if you see yourself as victimized and give yourself an excuse for not doing better than you’re doing.

Crenshaw says,

This divide is perhaps the most important cultural battle facing modern America, personified by those who proudly overcome adversity versus those who seek recognition for their victimhood. Empowerment versus disempowerment. Hope versus despair. Fortitude versus fragility.

You might also call this a clash between blame and responsibility.

Because, he says, “A stronger America is a more prosperous America, and we can only accomplish that if we become stronger Americans,” it’s worth looking at how we change this negative narrative. He suggests,

How do we get better? The answer lies in better storytelling. When a bad thing happens —and they certainly do happen—we tell ourselves a story about it. The story shouldn’t be about changing the facts of the event or downplaying the severity of true trauma. It should be about changing our interpretation of it. We can tell ourselves a story of despair and self-pity, from which we may never recover, or we can tell ourselves a story of overcoming hardship and being stronger for it. The outcomes of each of these opposing paths are obvious. For me, one path would have sent me on permanent disability collection. The other path sent me to Congress.

Bad stuff does happen. It happened to him. A strong person, a person with fortitude, doesn’t go through life saying, “If only such and such hadn’t happened to me, I’d be a different and more successful person.” A person with fortitude works to overcome adversity, figuring things out along the way, and then can say, “I didn’t let those things stand in my way. Maybe I’m even more successful because overcoming those things made me stronger than I would have been.”

Quote attributed to Anonymous,
Matthew McConaughey, Raunak Narula, and others.
Image found here.

Reading this op-ed coincided with my re-reading the book Bonds That Make Us Free: Healing Our Relationship, Coming to Ourselves, by C. Terry Warner of the Arbinger Institute. This is a deep thinking book. And I don’t agree with it entirely; there’s a section near the back, on forgiveness, that strikes me as blaming a person for even noticing that wrong has been done to them. I think you can’t be so focused on what you think is forgiving that you end up inviting disrespect or even abuse. Maybe that’s not the intention, but I prefer this Prager U video on forgiveness instead.

Warner says this “feeling stuck” we may sense is “experiencing other people or circumstances as having more power over our own happiness than we do.” That seems to me the same thing Dan Crenshaw is talking about. We want to regain our own power over what we experience in life. But in most of the book, the emphasis is on how to reframe what you’re experiencing—with the intention of actually seeing the truth rather than a distortion you’re making up because you’re centered on yourself.

Despite that part of the book I don’t agree with, in the body of the book Warner differentiates between being a victim—for which we are not responsible, such as being mugged or falling ill or actually being discriminated against—and portraying ourselves as a victim. As he says, “acting and feeling victimized does not make a person a real victim.” And if it’s a matter of frame of mind, that’s something you can change. That’s the good news.

Warner suggests stepping back and looking at who your focus is on—yourself or others. If it’s on ourself, we’re not seeing truth; we’re seeing a distortion. We are in an untruthful, distorted state when we are:

·         Accusing others,

·         Excusing ourselves, or

·         Displaying ourselves as a victim (p. 59).

I remember when the country was first getting acquainted with Dan Crenshaw (after we Texans voted him in, so we already knew him), it surrounded his interaction with SNL actor Pete Davidson, who said derogatory things about him. Dan wasn’t concerned. As he said, he’s had bullets shot at him, and he’s been blown up; words thrown at him aren’t worth noticing. He only responded when he saw an opportunity to stand up for the military. He wasn’t a victim; he was a victor.

Even when you are actually victimized, there’s a point at which being a victim ends; you don’t have to live your life acting out the part of the victim. You can recover and get on with the business of living.

What if you don’t know how to recover? That’s where a deep dive into this book, or Crenshaw’s book, might be helpful. And maybe some counseling. But it’s really an attitude shift. Warner says, “The general principle is this: One person can give offense only if the other will take offense” (p. 98). Later on the same page he refers to those who choose to take offense:

We use words like touchy, thin-skinned, and hypersensitive to describe such people. Sometimes I have thought of them as missile-seeking targets.

Much of the effort at attitude change come in letting go of self-absorption. It is seeing self at the exclusion of the other person—dehumanizing them. If you accept someone as the human they are at a given time, flaws and all, then those offenses can get shrugged off. I’ve read that bullies often don’t know they are bullies; they think they are defending themselves from being bullied or taken advantage of. If you can see yourself in a position of strength, willing to help another human, then their offenses look different. You may still get injured, but you don’t get victimized.

I’m looking at this “woke culture” “social justice warrior” situation that Dan Crenshaw is referencing. It seems to me that what needs to change—and what he’s recommending—is that those who feel offended just stop it.

I see it as a problem for them to fix in themselves.

That, according to Warner, is me in the way of the problem; I’m blaming. Hmm. I’ll want to fix that.

I can only deal with me and my attitude. So, I recognize that there are humans suffering—some of them suffering actual hurt, some of them suffering only what they’ve invented—and isn’t that sad for them. I don’t want them to be stuck in anger, resentment, and self-pity. There are happier ways to live.

What can I do? Recognize their humanity, while also speaking out against a culture that encourages their weakness rather than their overcoming adversity. If we truly care about them, we want for them a culture than increases their fortitude.

So, we need to find more truth and say it. Don’t smash them with it; offer it for them to take or leave. But let them know life is already happier for people who don’t do what they’re doing. As Crenshaw says in his book,

[Y]ou’ll never see a happy (or funny) social justice warrior: A system that falsely promises the end of suffering also strips individuals of the capacity to deal with it (p. 240).

It isn’t compassionate to censor words they’ve decided are offensive. It isn’t compassionate to coddle, mollify, and infantilize. Maybe we should try treating them like adults, so maybe they can live up to that.

Candace Owens with her new baby
image found here

Candace Owens wrote a piece for British media comparing her life situation to that of Meghan Markle, who gave an interview with Oprah a couple of weeks ago, trying to elicit sympathy for how hard life has been for her because the British royal family is so racist; apparently someone wondered what the royal son would look like. Owens is an American black (not half-black and indiscernible like Meghan Markle, but fully black) and also married to a white Englishman. In Owens’ case, she married the son of a Lord rather than a prince. Owens gave birth to a son in January. She says this about the question of her son’s color:

I cannot tell you how many times I was asked that question while I was pregnant with my son last year.

It came from not only my sisters, who are fully black and darker than I am, but also from my husband and from me as we day-dreamed about what our beautiful boy would look like. ‘What colour do think his eyes will be?’ we’d enquire aloud. ‘Will his hair be darker or lighter?’

If it needs spelling out, no, I am not a racist black American, nor is the man who happened to marry me a racist Englishman.

Instead, we are parents, as my sisters were future-aunts, beyond excited to imagine who our bi-racial, multicultural child would look like.

So hearing Meghan Markle frame the questions about her son’s skin colour—however innocently intended—as racist ‘concern’ rather than harmless imagination made my skin crawl.

If you have seen a picture of Archie and you believe that he was ever the victim of anti-black racism, then I am a stranded Nigerian prince who needs you to send him your bank account details straight away.

She talks about that difference in attitude:

How is it that despite the British press having spent years covering my political commentary, and with at times deeply critical and mean-spirited attacks against my character, I have never interpreted such criticism as evidence of Britain’s inherent racism?

Maybe it’s because, through the school of hard knocks, I’ve come to accept that not every person is going to like me. I’m also perceptive enough to conclude that branding every person who dislikes me a racist might be the quickest way to ensure that I really am disliked.

Meghan does not seem to have worked through this equation just yet.

The difference in attitude is a choice. And Candace Owens has made the better one. I think Owens is a happier person than Meghan Markle. It’s not the color of skin that matters; it’s the toughness of skin. Owens has learned not to let herself be a victim. That’s admirable. Crying that being a princess is just too hard—that’s not admirable. If living a fairy-tale life leaves you miserable, you’re not living right.

As musician Zuby put it in a tweet:

Tweet passed along by Buck Sexton on

 

 

How to Build Up Your Fortitude

A few weeks ago I read a book I got excited about sharing. It’s my Congressman Dan Crenshaw’s book, Fortitude. I had the audio version from the library, which is excellent, because he reads it himself. But it made getting quotes difficult. So I ordered the hard copy and have been waiting for that to arrive (it was lost on delivery day once and had to be reordered—a first-world problem), and it just got here Friday.

Since I first heard Dan speak, when I was deciding who wouldget my vote in the primary, 2 ½ years ago, I recognized him as a good communicator. He’s clear, to the point, on target. And, a huge bonus—he’s cool in a way that connects with his generation, and mine. He’s within a year of my oldest son, Political Sphere, so he’s a millennial.

Dan, you’ll recall, is the guy with the eye patch. He was hit by an IED in Afghanistan in 2012, as a Navy SEAL. He stayed in the service and deployed twice more after that, and did a lot of training. But then, against his will, they decided a half-blind guy wasn’t suitable for service, a decision he’s still not happy about. But he went on to Harvard Kennedy School of Government for a master’s degree in Public Administration. He finished up in 2017, close to the time Hurricane Harvey hit Houston, his hometown, and he went to work mucking out houses. Also that fall, our previous Congressman Ted Poe announced his intention to retire. Over a weekend Dan and family thought it through, and, pretty much without financial resources, started running for US Congress, in Texas’s Congressional District 2. About 8 others thought that was a good idea, too, most of them better funded and better connected.

That first time I heard him speak, he said, among all those conservatives, we’re all saying the same things; we’re all going to vote pretty much the same way. The important thing is to inspire others to vote that way too. He was inspiring me to vote for him; I believed he could do it.

And I worked on his campaign, delivering yard signs, and got to talk with him in smaller house group Q&As a number of times. I became more and more impressed with the way he said things—and I am a collector of things well said.

Still, I wasn’t sure what to expect from his book. Maybe mostly the story about his SEAL team experience and the recovery after the IED. And maybe there would be some conservative politics in it. But the book is so much better than I expected.

The story is there—including the SEAL team experience. He tells about how, the first time he went through BUD/S, or “hell week,” the worst week of SEAL training, intended to weed out the weak—his leg broke, a stress fracture caused by the grueling training that’s beyond most human bodies’ ability to endure. That meant he had to rehabilitate for half a year, and then go through the whole ordeal again. Because he wasn’t going to quit. As he puts it, “There is no plan B.” And failure isn’t an option. So you do whatever it takes.

There’s almost no politics in the book. Although, if you think of politics as policy to implement principles, then there’s a fair amount of conservatism in there. But what the book really is is a guide for how to live your best life—a way to be the best version of you that you can be.

In the introduction, he’s talking about some of the cultural problems we’re facing, and how to fix them. He says,

We aren’t acting as a culture that is mature or enlightened or educated, we aren’t acting worthy of this beautiful country and political system that we inherited from our revolutionary ancestors. Rather, we don a mantle of fragility, of anger, of childishness, and are utterly shameless in doing so (p.9).

He has a message to the snowflake culture:

If you’re losing your cool, you are losing. If you are triggered, it is because you allowed someone else to dictate your emotional state. If you are outraged, it is because you lack discipline and self-control. These are personal defeats, not the fault of anyone else. And each defeat shapes who you are as a person, and in the collective sense, who we are as a people (p. 10).

The book is intended to help people develop the discipline and self-control to overcome the outrage culture. He states the book’s purpose this way:

This book is about actively hardening your mind so that you can be the person you think you should be. It is about identifying who that person is in the first place, and taking responsibility for the self-improvement required to become them. It is about learning what it means to never quit. It is about learning to take a joke and giving others some charity when they make a bad one. It is about learning what it means to never quit. It is about learning to take a joke and giving others some charity when they make a bad one. It is about the importance of building a society of iron-tough individuals who can think for themselves, take care of themselves, and recognize that a culture characterized by grit, discipline, and self-reliance is a culture that survives. A culture characterized by self-pity, indulgence, outrage, and resentment is a culture that falls apart. It really is that simple, and it is a truly existential choice (p.10).

Dan happens to be a good storyteller, with a good sense of humor—albeit somewhat dark, since that comes from the SEAL culture. (And, a warning for the very sensitive, there is some language in the book that is also part of SEAL culture.) For example, he starts out telling of the IED explosion by telling why the Taliban used that method:

Smart bombs aren’t cheap, and national security is an expensive pursuit. The Taliban spent about ten bucks, including the cost of labor and medical benefits.

To which he adds this footnote:

Note to the Fact Checkers: THIS IS A JOKE. Taliban don’t have health insurance.

When his buddies from the teams, Joe and Dave, were with him during his hospital recovery, they wasted no time before asking him, “So, Dan, we can start making fun of you for looking like a pirate for the rest of your life, right?” As he adds, “Never too early for the dark humor of the teams.”

He gives enough detail about the recovery—including the miracle that he regained his sight in his left eye—but he does it without any sense of self-pity. At all. Just gratitude. To doctors. To his wife, Tara, who was his fiancée at that time, and stuck with him through all the pain and irritability—including spending six fully conscious weeks post-eye-surgery lying flat on his stomach to prevent the retina from detaching and causing permanent blindness. And gratitude to the many good people in the military he had worked with—and particularly to those who gave the ultimate sacrifice, or ended up with disabilities much greater than his.

He teaches at least one principle for developing your personal character, in each chapter. I’d have to say the book is part LoneSurvivor, and part Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life. It’s a bit less esoteric than Peterson, which may be a good thing for some readers, but the depth is there. He quotes Peterson, and Jonathan Haidt, and mythology, and Star Wars, and a pretty wide range of sources—and seems equally at ease with them all.

Some of the key ideas are:

·         Emulating the right kinds of heroes.

·         Be all in; be flexible, but accept no plan B on your main goal.

·         Be still; learn self-control over your emotions.

·         Sweat the small stuff; pay attention to details.

·         Have the right sense of shame; hold yourself accountable.

·         Have a sense of duty; and do your duty.

·         Do something hard; challenge yourself.

And he’s got a good final chapter on why America is a country worth loving, protecting, and preserving. He’s not about blindly assuming all is well. But we need to see more than flaws in a country this good:

So what is the right story? Is it just blindly assuming that whatever our country does is inherently good and righteous? No, that isn’t what I am suggesting. Just because victimhood ideology is toxic does not mean we have never had victims. But we must tell the story of America in a way that squares our suffering and injustice within the American identity without holding it in contempt for that injustice (p. 230).

Then he gives examples.

There’s José de la Luz Sáenz, a schoolteacher from Cotulla, Texas, who was called up to fight abroad in WWI and served with honor, hoping to emulate George Washington. He later formed the League of United Latin American Citizens.

There’s Frederick Douglass, who called on Americans to live up to the principles in their founding documents, saying, “The Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT” (p. 233).

There’s Martin Luther King, Jr., who faced true injustice, and stared it down, peacefully, until an otherwise righteous people recognized their wrong in subjecting people more civilized than they themselves were.

Dan Crenshaw rejects the Howard Zinn/Herbert Marcuse version of America. And with it the Ilhan Omar, Beto O-Rourke, and Pete Buttigieg disapproval of everything American from our founding to the present. Modern political “progressives” say,

“Give us power… and we will end human suffering. We will end failure.

But until we do, stay angry. Stay outraged.

Why is this the wrong approach? Here’s the real point:

It’s an approach that does more than diminish the country. Far worse, it diminishes people. That’s why you’ll never see a happy (or funny) social justice warrior: A system that falsely promises the end of suffering also strips individuals of the capacity to deal with it. It’s ontological malpractice (p. 240).

You don’t come out ahead by expecting someone else to end your suffering. It’s not good to make government into a god that makes such promises while taking away your confidence and ability to deal with and solve your own problems.

The better story to tell is a belief in self-reliance. If we are to reverse the current cultural trend,

We must decide that our happiness is ours to pursue, not given to us by a supposedly benevolent politician. We will decide that our story—despite all the suffering we may endure—is not the product of an external immovable force, but our own to contend with. We must decide that we will be empowered and in charge of our own destiny. We must decide to tell the story of America that embodies the founding ideals and gave us the miracle of opportunity that we have today. We must tell a story that we are proud of (p. 241).

Dan Crenshaw doesn’t set himself up as a hero. He sees himself as a more-or-less regular guy who is spending a lifetime working to be the best he can be. And he’s sharing what he knows, to guide others in that attempt at the “pursuit of happiness” and a meaningful life. Still, in today’s world, he does look pretty heroic by comparison to all but a select few.

I've had my yard sign up for a month already.

In our reading for church this week, we covered one of my favorite heroes. It’s a military hero in a time of unrest, who writes the purpose for their defensive war on a banner to remind the people. He writes, “In memory of our God, our religion, and freedom, and our peace, our wives, and our children” (Alma 46:12).  God has granted them the basis for their liberty, just as He has for us; evil power mongers are attempting to force them into subjugation, a parallel to what we are facing. It’s a cause worth the fight.

This man who inspires his people by clarifying their cause is named Captain Moroni—not the same Moroni depicted in the angel atop our temples, but an earlier person by the same name. Of Captain Moroni it was said,  

If all men had been, and were, and ever would be, like unto Moroni, behold, the very powers of hell would have been shaken forever; yea, the devil would never have power over the hearts of the children of men (Alma 48:17). 

I am considering applying these words to Dan Crenshaw as well. He warns in his book against making any particular person a hero, because every person is human and flawed. But you can look at the ideal version, the characteristics of the person that are worth emulating. It’s a practice George Washington began early in his life as well, to decide what kind of person to be, and to set out becoming such a person.

I pray that Rep. Dan Crenshaw may continue to be exemplary, like unto George Washington, who also proved himself in battle against tyranny before leading a righteous people in liberty. And I support him in his effort to share the message of how to develop yourself—how to live a life of Fortitude.

So I recommend the book—for young people who don’t yet know what kind of person to become, for adults who missed the teaching or need reminding, and for the rest of us who need a dose of inspiration to be better than we have been.